Flic

@theuniqueone @okwithmydecay I don’t. The unspoken bit is always race. “I’m anti [brown] immigration and I’m worried about [white] population decline” are not incompatible.

@als @moderatecentrist he’s always campaigned using plausible deniability though. It’s just *those* people. You know, the people we don’t like. Not people who are already here. *Good* immigrants who we *approve* of are ok.
This kind of disproves that and removes the figleaf for (some) people.
Personally I’d go with the fact it’s just straight up horrendous bullying. That’s a harder sell for someone who says he’s just fighting to protect all us poor weak victims who already live here.

@okwithmydecay NB you can also often join libraries in neighbouring counties too. Useful if you like ebooks and audiobooks as it expands the catalogue you can access if you have more than one library card. They often also give you free access to online newspapers and magazines, and sometimes streaming platforms too.
But please also go in! Ours does free coffee, has desks and free WiFi, and you can use their scanner and pay to use their printer if you don’t have your own.

@floofloof @FishFace the Quiet Riot podcast was discussing their utter consternation (surprise is the wrong word) that in the same year Starmer couldn’t accept so much as a pair of trousers from a donor, and Reeves and Rayner were being leapt on for everything, Farage has accepted a £9m crypto donation (90% of Reform’s funding for the year) and nobody has pushed him on what influence that has bought, or what went on with Nathan Gill and the Russian bribes.

@Wen @moderatecentrist can’t say the same for NI. Wonder what would have happened with the Theresa May Brexit situation if Arlene Foster weren’t such a lunatic.

@Wen @moderatecentrist although I am grateful for Scotland/Wales still being in the UK because without them the HoC would be Tory all the time (not that that’s a good reason to stay)

@shalafi @Diddlydee NB in British law he’d have had a much better chance because if someone claims defamation, the statement in question is presumed false unless the person/org who made it can prove it is true. Which is an incredibly high bar in a lot of circumstances and leads to people being very careful with their words - and is also why this whole situation is really strange from the outset as the BBC have to be pretty hot on this kind of thing.

@shalafi @Diddlydee did you see the programme in question, though? I mean, none of us can, now, and I didn’t see it at the time. But it’s one very small clip in the context of a much longer programme, so surely the whole context would be relevant here. Was the *programme* misrepresenting him? Not just this clip, a few seconds long.

@G4Z yeah in principle I agree but in practice “the internet” is about 4 companies. Until there’s more competition your data is being consolidated anyway. And the only way to get competition is to enforce regulation. I don’t think this is *good* regulation but I don’t see why we should have to do what Apple want just because they’re big.
Interestingly this comes at the same time as the smartphone-free childhood thing is gaining steam so there’s probably a real-world solution anyway.

@oeuf @G4Z I realise it’s never going to happen and there would be loads of other fallout I haven’t thought about, but I think governments *should* be allowed to. They can in every other field - our booze laws aren’t the same as the US’s, why should our dick pic laws be?
It might de-monopolise the industry a bit.

@HermitBee because that’s why Reeves said electric vehicles should pay per mile. She announced it by saying "Because all cars contribute to the wear and tear on our roads, I will ensure that drivers are taxed according to how much they drive, not just by the type of car they use.”
I’m not saying this particularly carries through to how roads are funded; I’m saying if this claim *is* the reason to tax EVs then the tax should be structured differently.

@frankPodmore @Jrockwar cars should be taxed according to size and weight, imo, if you’re bringing road maintenance & wear and tear into it. Then beyond that fuel source can be taxed according to pollution levels, as it currently kind of is (especially if they actually *do* unfreeze fuel duty).

@TIN I agree with your last point: the per-mile setup should apply to all vehicles according to size and weight if it is truly for road wear. Pollution can then be captured separately according to fuel source. Unfortunately the government has been too toothless to increase fuel duty for years.
Regarding your other point: yes! I think councils should run permit charging like resident parking: if you have a resident permit you can charge in council car parks for £x.

@TIN none of this is to say that nobody should be allowed to park near their house; but in general it would do us all good to recognise that parking is *never* free, even if we’re not personally paying an upfront fee.

@TIN and, lastly, if all your roads have cars parked along them then there is no room for safe cycle lanes, which again challenges any efforts towards net zero. Not least for children and teens, as suddenly all their parents have to chauffeur them in cars for every middle-distance urban journey for their entire childhood and adolescence to get them safely to their destinations, rather than letting them get there alone or cycling alongside them in a segregated lane.

@TIN and high streets suffer because walkable town centres suddenly become a less tempting option for the people who could spend ten minutes walking in, or ten minutes driving *out* to a supermarket they can park at (where again, their parking is “free”, ie it is subsidised by shoppers paying more, and not all of those shoppers are drivers)

@TIN meanwhile buses are held up in traffic by drivers living in or near urban centres, and those car owners drive door to door rather than using public transport, reducing the profitability of the public transport and leaving fewer transport options for non-drivers. Meanwhile pedestrians are left with no or narrow pavements because an entire lane of the carriageway, maybe two, is given over to stationary vehicles.

@TIN I’m based in the UK. I agree that parts of this could have been thought through better but I don’t think publicly subsidised parking outside homes that were built within walking distance of towns & stations, because that was how you reached towns before cars existed, is neutral or a net good. Those houses become overvalued because people price in cheap parking, meaning people who can’t/can’t afford to drive are priced out of homes that would suit their lifestyles.

@TIN @manualoverride I wonder if longer term a solution might be for councils to offer resident-permit-charging in public car parks.

@TIN @manualoverride hmmm. I never like this argument. it implies you bought a car that you couldn’t store with the assumption that you could get subsidised (perhaps free) parking on public land?

Don’t get me wrong, I feel for you, but “I couldn’t afford a plot big enough for a car in my chosen location, and wasn’t willing to live somewhere cheaper, but bought a car anyway” is the neutral position people think it is. I’d like an extension but I can’t just put a home office on the road outside.